Eleanor and Franklin (108 page)

I have discovered that there are a few advantages to being the President! Never before when I sat and waited for operations to be over, has anybody come and reported to me what was going on or what was the patient's condition. This time every now and then some one came to tell the President how far the work had progressed in that marvelous white operating room upstairs and I decided that this was on the whole one real advantage for which a President could be grateful!
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The operation was successful, and no malignancy was found. Ten days later the doctors pronounced James out of danger and the president left—to face the Munich crisis. “I want to thank all of you,” he said to the citizens of Rochester, “for what I can best describe as an understanding heart. . . . You have understood that I have come here not as President but as a father; and you have treated me accordingly.” After a period of convalescence James resigned as secretary to the president, despite his father's protests, because he did not feel physically up to the White House job and because his marriage was breaking up. He took a job in Hollywood as assistant to Samuel Goldwyn at $25,000 a year, which created another storm: What did James Roosevelt have to offer Hollywood that made him worth $25,000 except his name? And Eleanor came under fire because she became a director of the insurance firm of Roosevelt & Sargent in order to protect Jimmy's interests.

This incident gave her a chance to say some of the things which Franklin had dissuaded her from writing a year earlier. Did the American people expect the children of their president to live lives of enforced idleness or to go out and earn their own livings, she asked. While the president's term in office is limited, she pointed out, it was long enough to ruin the lives of the younger members of his family if they were compelled to lead a completely restricted existence. As for her appointment to the board of Roosevelt & Sargent, she planned to attend meetings to cast her son's vote, not to sell insurance. Then she broadened the issue to defend her right to engage in private business. Did they expect the president's wife to sacrifice all her personal accomplishments and all the interests she had built up? If that were the case, some day a wife might refuse to go with her husband to the White House at such a sacrifice. When a man was elected to the presidency the voters did not give the rest of his family jobs, she emphasized.
The only concession she made to critics was an acknowledgment that there was an ethical obligation upon members of a White House family not to profit from special governmental favors in their business undertakings.
†
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By and large, the public approved her statement. To Dr. Gallup's question, “Do you think the President's wife should engage in any business activity which interests her if she doesn't do it for profit?” 73 per cent of those polled replied “yes.”
³³
Whether the answer would have been the same about the children's business activities is more debatable. “They may be worth the high salaries they have been offered and accepted since their father became president of the United States,” wrote the
Springfield News and Leader,

But we do not believe that William Randolph Hearst, whose place in national affairs is too well known to need recital, would have engaged Elliott Roosevelt, who knew nothing of radio, to become the head of the Hearst radio chain at a princely stipend had his father not been president, we do not believe Mr. Hearst would have engaged his son-in-law at a salary well in the five figures as a publisher almost the moment he married the president's daughter if it were not for his admittance into the Roosevelt family, we do not believe that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would have snatched up Jimmie Roosevelt at a Hollywood retainer if papa hadn't been sitting on the throne.
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So what? was the reply of the
Dail
y News
.

That the President's power and influence don't do his children any harm is of course true. But how about, for instance, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Nelson Rockefeller, Junius Spencer Morgan, E. R. Stettinius Jr., Edsel Ford? Those men are all energetic, able and highly respected. But one potent reason why they are as far along in the world as they are today is that their fathers were or are wealthy men.

It is taken for granted that a man who has made or inherited a wad of money in private business of some kind will help his children
to get well started in the world. Nobody except a Red here or there objects to that.

But when a President of the United States merely LETS his children work at any trade at all, his political enemies caterwaul about nepotism and unfair advantages and undue influence. This, though the above-mentioned private fortunes are usually long-lived, while the Presidency up to now is only an eight-year job at the outside.
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“Dear Colonel Patterson,” Eleanor wrote, “I deeply appreciate your writing as you did and am greatly heartened to have your support of my point of view.”
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The attacks on the president and his wife for “exploiting” their connection with the White House were generally discounted as politics. “The long and the short of these attacks on the President's family is that they constitute dirty politics,” the
Daily News
said, and added for itself that there were “far more substantial reasons for disagreeing with President Roosevelt, and far more decent sportsmanlike ways to fight him.”

Years later James wrote that Father “should have been a lot tougher with all of us . . . he should have counselled us more instead of leaving us free to steer our own courses.”
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No doubt Eleanor thought so too, and her communications to Franklin were filled with such pleas as “tell him he
has
to live on his income . . . until he earns his own money.” Yet she, too, leaned over backward not to interfere in her children's lives and rallied to their defense when they got into trouble.

Children who are raised in liberal, enlightened households often look back at their lives and the wasted opportunities and wish their parents had been tougher. They do not remember the many occasions when their parents were firm and their only reaction was defiance and obstinacy. Once when she returned to the White House Eleanor found Franklin Jr. there, home from Charlottesville, where he was enrolled in the University of Virginia law school. He had not decided whether to return that night or early in the morning. “In my most organizing spirit, I started to make his plans for him and he looked at me with the funniest expression and said: ‘I don't like being organized. I'm going to flip a coin!'” Eleanor was contrite. “It is good to be reminded every now and then of the bad habits which come with age. Grown persons do not like to have their minds made up for them. They like to arrive at a decision on their own volition. We mothers
have a dreadful tendency to behave as though no one in the world could manage except ourselves.”
³⁸

“No one ever lives up to the best in themselves all the time,” Eleanor once wrote a friend, “and nearly all of us love people because of their weaknesses rather than because of their strengths.” That was true of her attitude toward her friends. It was even truer of her feelings toward her children.:

I don't know how other parents are, but I know that for myself, I can stand back and look at my children and what they do and think, once they are grown up, with a certain amount of objectiveness. On the other hand, I know quite well that there is a bond between us, and that right or wrong, that bond could never be broken. I am proud of them when I think they have acquitted themselves well, regardless of what the rest of the world may think, and even when I disagree and feel impelled to tell them so, I know that I understand them better than anyone else, perhaps. They are always my children, with the right to call upon me in case of need. The greatest contribution the older generation can give, I think, to the younger generation, is the feeling that there is someone to fall back upon, more especially when the hard times of life come upon them, and that is so even when we know that we have brought those hard times on ourselves.

“We could not ask that they give us peace and quiet,” she wrote at the end of the White House years.
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*
Franklin Jr. said his mother had sharpened the story to make her point. The judge fined him thirty dollars and
then
took him home for dinner.

†
Her own income in 1938 totaled $61,128 of which $54,072 constituted remuneration for professional services—$1,000 from the Junior Literary Guild, approximately $17,000 from the United Feature Syndicate for her column, $23,000 from royalties and other writings, and $13,000 from lectures.

43.
THE DIVIDED WHITE HOUSE

T
HE DOMESTIC SIDE OF RUNNING THE
W
HITE
H
OUSE WAS LEFT
to Eleanor. She issued the social invitations, planned the family reunions and parties, saw to it that none of their friends were overlooked. She was responsible for the housekeeping. The government paid for official entertainment, but the food the family and its personal guests consumed came out of the Roosevelt personal budget, so she kept two sets of accounts and five checkbooks. “The first of each month I am always rather breathless until I have balanced all my check books.” Her biggest complication was the people who preferred to keep her checks as souvenirs rather than deposit them.
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The White House during the years of her mistress-ship was a place of warm hospitality, fun, and good-fellowship.

Although Eleanor was not witty, she liked fun and parties and had a sense of humor, especially about herself. She was too kind to take advantage of someone else's vulnerabilities for the purpose of a sally or a satire, but her laughter led the rest when her own foibles were lampooned.

The highlight of the Gridiron Widows parties were the skits in which she and Elinor Morgenthau acted and for which Elinor's versatile secretary provided the verses. In 1938 to the tune of “Gallagher and Shean” she and Elinor sang and danced:

The skits at the White House skirted controversy, but those put on by the newspaperwomen at the Women's National Press Club were highly political and often centered around the First Lady. In 1937 Eleanor was portrayed on a sit-down strike at the White House to obtain union hours for presidents' wives. The curtain rose, wrote Emma Bugbee, showing the White House portico draped with a huge sign on which was lettered,

THIS SHOP CLOSED. SIT DOWN STRIKE
.

Eleanor's robust laugh rang through the room as a procession of pickets demanded “Union hours for First Ladies,” “No more inaugural teas,” “No more than 300 handshakes a day.” Figures with banners representing the organizations accustomed to being sponsored by First Ladies—charities, battleships, peace movements, balls, musicales, thrift shops and hospital benefits, horse shows and amateur dramatics, high-school debates and baby contests—marched past the footlights expressing their dismay.

“Mrs. Roosevelt! Mrs. Roosevelt! We can't get our names in the papers any more,” protested a delegation from the societies. There was no response from the sit-down striker. In marched a distressed group from the Society of Critics of Mrs. Roosevelt to implore her cooperation. Frances Perkins arrived to try to settle the strike, but retired moaning and defeated. Newsboys rushed across the stage, shouting, “Mrs. Roosevelt won't negotiate.” But the show had to go on, so other
skits were presented, with Mrs. Roosevelt still sitting down. The skit ended with the appearance of two strikebreakers at the White House, figures easily recognizable as representing Mrs. Herbert Hoover and Mrs. Alfred M. Landon. Eleanor ended the program with an off-the-record speech in which she “got even” with her friends of the Press Club, a speech that unfortunately was not recorded.
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